Procedure of morphemic analysis

Classification of morphemes

Morphemes may be classified from the semantic and structural points of view.

Semantically morphemes fall into two classes: root-morphemes and non-rootmorphemes.

The root-morpheme is the lexical nucleus of a word. It has its individual lexical meaning and all other types of meaning proper to a morpheme except the part-of-speech meaning. The root-morpheme is isolated as the morpheme common to a set of words making up a word-cluster. E.g.: to read, read er, read ing.

Non-root morphemes include inflectional morphemes or inflections and affixational morphemes or affixes.

Inflections carry only grammatical meaning and are used to form word-forms. They are the object of morphology.

Affixes possess a part-of-speech meaning and a generalized lexical meaning and are used for building word-stems and word-formation. The stem is the part of a word that remains unchanged throughout its paradigm. Lexicology is concerned only withaffixational morphemes.

By the position within the word-structure affixes are subdivided into prefixes, suffixes and infixes.

A prefix precedes the root-morpheme; e.g.: dis charge.

A suffix follows the root-morpheme; e.g.: read er.

An infix is inside the root-morpheme; e.g.: sta n d as compared to stood.

Structurally morphemes fall into three types: free morphemes, bound morphemes and semi-free or semi-bound morphemes.

A free morpheme is defined as the one that coincides with the stem of a word-form. Generally root-morphemes are free morphemes; e.g.: read er, friend ship, ship wreck.

A bound morpheme occurs only as a constituent part of a word. All affixes and unique and pseudo-roots are bound morphemes; e.g.: good ness, dis charge, friend ship, theor y, de ceive.

Semi-free or semi-bound morphemes can function in a morphemic sequence both as an affix and as a free morpheme. E.g.: the morphemes well and half occur as free morphemes that coincide with the stem and the word-form in utterances like sleep well, half an hour. But they occur as bound morphemes in words like well-known, half-done.

There are two more types of morphemes: combining forms and semi-suffixes.

Bound root-morphemes of Latin and Greek origin are called combining forms. E.g.: tele phone, tele graph and micro phone, photo graph.

A semi-suffix is termed as a word-building element formally coinciding with the stem or word-form of a free separate word but acting as an affix. E.g.: cab man, bar- happy.

Segmentable words can allow of the analysis of their word-structure on the morphemic level.

The operation of breaking a segmentable word into the constituent morphemes is referred to as morphological or morphemic analysis, or the analysis of word-structure on the morphemic level.

The morphemic analysis is aimed at splitting a segmentable word into its constituent morphemes and determining their number, types and arrangement.

The procedure employed for segmenting words into constituent morphemes is the method of Immediate (IC s) and Ultimate Constituents (UC s). This method is based on a binary principle. Each stage of the procedure involves two components into which the word immediately breaks. At each stage these two components are referred to as the ICs. Each IC at the next stage of analysis is in turn broken into two smaller meaningful elements. The analysis is completed when we arrive at constituents incapable of further division, i.e. morphemes which are referred to as the UCs.

The analysis of the morphemic composition of words defines the ultimate meaningful constituents, their number, types, sequence and arrangement within the word-structure.

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